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jitendraharlalka sends news of a claimed algorithmic breakthrough by IBM, though from the scant technical detail provided it's hard to tell exactly how important the development might be. IBM apparently presented its results yesterday at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics conference in Seattle. The breathless press release begins: "IBM Research today unveiled a breakthrough method based on a mathematical algorithm that reduces the computational complexity, costs, and energy usage for analyzing the quality of massive amounts of data by two orders of magnitude. This new method will greatly help enterprises extract and use the data more quickly and efficiently to develop more accurate and predictive models. In a record-breaking experiment, IBM researchers used the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world... to validate nine terabytes of data... in less than 20 minutes, without compromising accuracy. Ordinarily, using the same system, this would take more than a day. Additionally, the process used just one percent of the energy that would typically be required."

Did you know that they actually made a TV Show [wikipedia.org] after that film? Needless to say, it was not a smash hit. It did have Jennifer Aniston, though, in her first significant role. Interesting trivia, eh?

I find it interesting on a philosophical level to think about what computing is doing to us. CPU's require energy to perform calculations. Then there's the system overhead, a fixed energy cost that included the assembly and set up costs, and the running and maintenance/replacement costs. Now obviously humans have been almost taken out of the equation. Where before you had thousands of workers all requiring to be fed, all requiring furniture and space and light and reasonably cool/warm air, all of them needing transport, and all of them victims of entropy and therefore needing accident and health insurance, taking sick days, etc. We've come a long way.

Now you just need the brains. Brains to design the system, brains to drive the investigation, and brains to try to improve the algorithms the system uses. To save even more energy. Of course eventually physical limits will be reached. There's no escaping the fundamental laws of our universe. But the energy "savings" from doing it the "old way" is translated into the ability to essentially brute-force the universe with raw computing power. Er, but what are we going to do with all the people who just don't "have" the brains? They get a free ride?

Now you just need the brains. Brains to design the system, brains to drive the investigation, and brains to try to improve the algorithms the system uses.... Er, but what are we going to do with all the people who just don't "have" the brains?

Er, but what are we going to do with all the people who just don't "have" the brains? They get a free ride?

That [welfareinfo.org] seems [stopthehou...ailout.com] to [propublica.org] be [bnet.com] the [securitygu...sguide.com] way [adelphi.edu] it's [vatican.va] been [funlol.com] working [bloomberg.com] so [thecarpetb...report.com] far [wikipedia.org].

A "post scarcity" economy is a physical impossibility. The universe doesn't have unlimited resources.

HOWEVER, it's at least plausible that an economy could exist whereby the essentials to support billions of human lives in decent conditions could be generated with almost no input of human labor. All living humans could get all of their needs, and most of their wants taken care of with little effort on their part. With virtual reality, those humans who wanted things the economy couldn't provide (their own

I want the people at Starbucks to not fuck up my order because they were hired to not fuck up coffee orders.

The problem with socialism is that as people expect more and more from their government they begin to expect less and less of themselves. If you socialist, wealth-redistributing, vomit-spewers scorn the idea of trickle-down economics in business why do you think it will magically work at the highest levels of government? In fact, it can work in business because companies are ultimately accountabl

One fatal flaw with capitalism is that it leads to runaway wealth and poverty distribution. Socioeconomic mobility is essentially destroyed. The "land of opportunity" as we've been called for so long becomes no more as time goes on. The rich get much richer every year, while the poor get relatively poorer over time.

We're seeing this now as the standards of living for the middle class have been in slow decline for over 15 years. The super-rich continue to amass wealth above the rate of inflation, while many

The rich get much richer every year, while the poor get relatively poorer over time.

That's not exactly true. I myself come from a background that 50 years ago was incredibly wealthy. The family had race-horses and private aircraft. Everyone had a brand new luxury car and changed it every year. We had all the luxuries, and no one has been obliged to "work" in a conventional "job" for 3 generations. We thought we had looked after our money. We have managed to triple our net worth over ti

One fatal flaw with capitalism is that it leads to runaway wealth and poverty distribution. Socioeconomic mobility is essentially destroyed. The "land of opportunity" as we've been called for so long becomes no more as time goes on. The rich get much richer every year, while the poor get relatively poorer over time.

And you think that has nothing to do with the government? Our government redistributes wealth to the rich through subsidies, creates big corporations through a mixture of stupid laws, complicated regulations and subsidies, and makes sure that the rich don't lose their money or power by providing bailouts. It's hardly capitalism creating the problem. Some of us oppose any socialist laws here because we know how they always turn out.

The speculative bubble as you say it affected millions of recent homebuyers.

Employer provided healthcare isn't wealth redistribution. It's a way for employers to provide a benefit to employees so they can pay them less, and simultaneously decrease their tax exposure. Benefits also attract better employees. It's a business decision, not some massive wealth redistribution conspiracy.

The real conspiracy is the single-payer healthcare system we have now. We need basic health services back on a fee-for-service s

The problem with socialism is that as people expect more and more from their government they begin to expect less and less of themselves.

That's a nice hypothesis, and a very common one. Would you like to back it up with facts?

Preferably a nice graph correlating various nations' economic growth with their economic models. Ideally, your graph should demonstrate that socialist countries like China and the former Soviet Union are/were composed of shiftless layabouts content to let their nations languish in obscurity, while the most laissez-faire or anarcho-capitalist countries lead the world in industrial growth.

Exactly. I once fixed a report that was running for 8 hours, cut it down to 90 seconds. But no one in their right mind would suggest that saved 99.7% of any energy, because the server was still running when the report was done. Now the other report that crashed the server after I fixed it is a different story...

To be followed by the sequel "Should you be buying that overpriced trendy crap?" But perhaps that would be too close to Starbucks' business model or be too close to actionable to make the consumers comfortably smug. (Yes, I'm sure I'm as bad as the rest of them. Pot, kettle, etc.)

yeah, but its two orders of magnitude. That's significant. All with you on fuck the new red revolution, but this is real savings to people that actually do stuff. It isn't like they converted the savings to tons of carbon dioxide, dihydrogen monoxide or polar bear.

Can someone please clarify exactly what they've achieved here? All I hear is that they can somehow sift through large quantities of data much quicker. What kind of data? What are they trying to extract? And for what end?

Can someone please clarify exactly what they've achieved here? All I hear is that they can somehow sift through large quantities of data much quicker. What kind of data? What are they trying to extract? And for what end?

I don't know about the rest of it, but I can answer the last question: To boost IBM's stock price! And as the holder of a number of IBM stock options, I must say I think that's a wonderful goal.:-)

The conference proceedings are not online yet. So I am not sure. I could not even find the title of the talk on the conference web page

I know people who are at SIAM PP and they are all : "why are they talking about PP on slashdot ?". There was no major anouncement. I'll check the proceedings again next week, but I believe there is no major improvement. IBM is probably just trying to get some more light.

Did you RTFA, they said right there it verifies data. Picture you have 400TB of HC particle data that you want to reduce but somebody stuffs some porn, pictures of their trip to Aruba and a loads of warez right smack in the middle of it. What are you going to do ?

Well IBM can help, they can verify that data and within mere hours remove that weird 399TB of noise and you're left with pure signal.

I don't mean to offend, but... are you even a programmer? There is no magic "verify data" algorithm. Supposing your scenario were to occur, you'd have to produce an algorithm that was specifically designed to either a) detect the specific form of noise you want to remove, or b) detect the signal you want to extract.

Right, we can have a post that the new Apple tablet device might be called the iSlate because it "just makes sense" , but a story that appears to be true isn't interesting just because it doesn't give implementation details.

Implementation details are not equivalent to merely clarifying what the heck it does. In the case of cold fusion it's pretty clear what it does: cold fusion. In the case of this press release it does "algorithmy things to your data really fast".

Without more information, this really sounds like they just had a horribly-slow-but-at-least-it-works algorithm in the first place and now done some work on making it more efficient. They don't even say what type of processing was being done on the data..

and Business Inteligence software. Things that large corps use to help make decisions (Goldman-Sachs?) and manipulate the banks/markets even faster today so Yea! This is a big deal to corps. Not so big a deal to individuals other then the damn corps can make idiot decisions even faster now.

Is there hope for a merge of all virtual fragmented universes into a single universe? We we can explore strange new worlds; seek out new life and new civilizations; boldly go where our avatar hasn't gone before?

I think the time is ripe for a Society for the Responsible Use of Information and Computational Power. Or we could convert the world to geekdom so we'll all be too busy drooling over this stuff to use it for evil.

Uncertainty quantification in risk analysis has become a keyapplication. In this context, computing the diagonal of in-verse covariance matrices is of paramount importance. Stan-dard techniques, that employ matrix factorizations, incur acubic cost which quickly becomes intractable with the cur-rent explosion of data sizes. In this work we reduce thiscomplexity to quadratic with the synergy of two algorithmsthat gracefully complement each other and lead to a radi-cally different approach. First, we turned to stochastic esti-mation of the diagonal. This allowed us to cast the problemas a linear system with a relatively small number of multipleright hand sides. Second, for this linear system we developeda novel, mixed precision, iterative refinement scheme, whichuses iterative solvers instead of matrix factorizations. Wedemonstrate that the new framework not only achieves themuch needed quadratic cost but in addition offers excellentopportunities for scaling at massively parallel environments.We based our implementation on BLAS 3 kernels that en-sure very high processor performance. We achieved a peakperformance of 730 TFlops on 72 BG/P racks, with a sus-tained performance 73% of theoretical peak. We stress thatthe techniques presented in this work are quite general andapplicable to several other important applications.

Obviously are not releasing details until the Patent application goes through and the Patent Troll company set up. They certainly would not release the information so other people could just steal their idea. Maybe they will package it in sealed application and rent it out. Hmmmm anyone remember the Chess Playing Mechanical Turk? (1770).

If your PC or cell phone does similar tasks, its computational load is reduced by two orders of magnitude (in other words, somewhere in the range of 1%). That means your computer of cell phone spends 1% of the time doing the work, and the other 99% of the time either doing other useful work (making it faster) or in standby (making it use less energy, or last longer on battery power, or the same time on less battery).

I consider all these things benefits. Of course, it depends on if the algorithm is actual

Back during one of the droughts in Southern California they called for mandatory conservation. The people actually took this to heart and water usage dropped so much that revenue at the local municipal water companies fell.

So the utilities raised their rates to get it back.

More conservation means having to obtain less resources, process less resources, employ less workers, spend less on distribution and capacity. After that, they can raise rates as well.

Man, the energy industry doesn't like it when five more people start riding bikes. They dispatch armies of lobbyists to Washington if there's even a hint that the EPA mileage standards are going to increase by three miles per gallon.

You best believe they're going to pay attention if computers become more energy efficient. You know how much of the nation's energy bill is because of computer use?

The funny thing about energy efficiency is that it saves companies money, but they get to spin it as being "green." [For example, when grocery stores eliminate plastic bags to be "green," what they really mean is they're eliminating bags to be "cheap."] If this new algorithm has no penalty associated with it, then it saves time and energy, therefore money and "the environment."

On their mainframes, IBM still charges for 'MIPS', which is processor usage... and they charge rather a lot. This could potentially cost them a lot of money, although it's unlikely the efficiency can be applied to the sort of simple business transactions that are typically done on that sort of hardware.

It took them 20 mins to do. Meaning they can do 70 more customers in one day. Charge 10% more for the same job. Poof 70x1.1xcost gross profit. Oh and it cost them 99% less power wise. Margin just went up by 99%. Meaning they can also undercut competitors in the field. Or resize the computer so it still takes a day and still sell by the same price point. So it just costs them 99% less to do powerwise and customers pay the same amount.

So, you'd rather them not be Green and waste money? And by "Penalty" you mean Government interference?

People like this have no idea of the consequences of their stupid insane policies. Here in California, we're losing Dairy Farms at an alarming rate, because of so-called "penalties" to raising cows.

Even Dairies that have tried to comply and work with the "Greenies" are folding, because the pound of flesh they demand never satiates them. There is always MORE that "needs" to be done. Green is never Green enou

ok, mr. anonymous, I work with all those wares, and the differences aren't *that* big, some percentage points in certain situations with certain hardware and certain transactions. and the very fastest way to run databases doesn't involve open source software, tpc.org will tell you all about that. it happens Oracle or DB2 on a big HP/UX or AIX is going to whoop open source ass with usual business needs on mid and large systems, but at huge cost and with vendor lock-in and limitations to customization and i